What it's Really Like to Manage an Outsourced Customer Service Team
Are you thinking about outsourcing a portion of your brand's customer support operations? You're not alone. More and more companies are realizing the benefits of outsourcing some portion of their customer support. Reasons for outsourcing include cost savings, increasing efficiency, tapping into domain-specific expertise, and improving customer experience.
With those benefits in mind, it's still vitally important to manage the outsourced team effectively and ensure they provide quality support to your customers.
As a brand executive or customer service leader, here are the seven areas of responsibility you can expect to manage in the course of outsourcing some portion of your customer service team:
Define, update, and communicate your customer experience goals throughout your organization
Build and manage a training program for your outsourced team
Set expectations and provide feedback regularly to your team via a structured quality assurance program
Set ground rules for communication between your outsourced team and your internal team
Work with your in-house staff on how to best leverage the outsourced customer service team
Create and manage an executive dashboard to monitor progress across your customer service operations
Celebrate successes and learn from failures
Let's dive in.
Setting Customer Experience Goals
One of the most important things to do when outsourcing customer service is to define your customer service goals. What are you hoping to achieve with outsourced customer support? Are you looking for cost savings, improved efficiency, or better customer experience outcomes? Define your goals and make sure they are communicated to your outsourced team.
In addition, be sure to gather buy-in and alignment from other internal stakeholders and business units. Everyone in your organization should understand the desired outcomes you are looking to achieve by outsourcing this portion of your customer service operations. As discussed below, messaging your successes and failures to those other stakeholders will be important as well. Your outsourced customer support provider should be able to help with dashboards, reporting, and data gathering to assist your internal communications.
Best Customer Experience Training
When building a training program for outsourced customer service agents, it's again important to keep in mind the goals of the program. What are you hoping to achieve with training? Are you looking to improve customer experience outcomes, increase efficiency, or reduce costs? Define your goals and only then will you be ready to build your training agenda or program.
The training program itself should be designed to meet the needs of your outsourced team. Agent training often begins with an unboxing experience where untrained agents go through the exact same process of opening and setting up the product that a new customer would go through.
From there, the CX training should be interactive and engaging. Training should also provide practical skills that can be applied in the course of communicating with your customers. It's also important to ensure that the training is consistent with the standards, best practices, and cultural norms of your company.
Once agents are up to speed and productively assisting customers, your ongoing quality assurance (QA) program should take over most of the training responsibility in the medium to long term.
Customer Service Quality Assurance Program
One of the most important things you can do to ensure your outsourced customer service team is providing quality support is to set expectations and provide feedback regularly via a structured quality assurance (QA) program.
There are a few key things you can do to facilitate a quality assurance program for your outsourced customer service team:
Establish clear goals and objectives for the program, and make sure everyone involved understands them. What do successful customer interactions look like and how do these successes feed into your broader goals of reducing costs, improving the customer experience, etc.?
Define what constitutes "quality customer service" and establish benchmarks each agent's customer interaction must meet in order to pass QA.
Conduct frequent random audits of the team's specific phone calls, emails, chat sessions and other customer communications to ensure agents are meeting your expectations. QA audits should include object feedback on categories that matter to you, but examples might include: Quality of the agent's greeting, tone, the correctness of each response, effective cross-sell suggestions, and proper salutation.
Create a process for regular feedback and reporting, so that you can track the team's progress and identify any areas that need improvement. It's nice to measure quality, but the measurement is only effective if the resulting feedback finds it's way to the eyes and ears of your agents on the front lines.
Lastly, the customer service QA program should be facilitated by an actual QA platform like Playvox, Medallia, MaestroQA and others. Don't leave QA management to spreadsheets or other half-baked solutions. Regardless of whether you are optimizing your outsourced customer service provider's performance for lower cost or higher quality, any little quality improvement will go a long way. The ROI with a solid quality assurance program is almost always immediate.
Communication between the outsourced team and your internal team
One of the most important things to do when outsourcing customer service is to establish ground rules for communication between the outsourced team and your internal team. This will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and that there is clear communication between the two teams. Some things to consider include:
How often will the teams communicate? Something as simple as a weekly sync can be very helpful in working through tactical issues in the short term and building valuable personal relationships between your inhouse and outsourced support teams in the longer term.
What information will be shared between the teams? Will regular reporting be reviewed? Hopefully so. Be sure to map this out and be consistent with it ongoing.
How will feedback be communicated between the teams? This can be a touchy subject and will fall back on your interpersonal and management skills. Both critical and positive feedback are important to deliver to the team and to individual agents on a regular basis (i.e. weekly and/or monthly).
How will issues be resolved? This doesn't always need to be planned in advance as a multitude of scenarios will be thrown your way, but be prepared to dedicate time to intervene when things go a little array. You or someone in your organization needs to act as an escalation path.
By setting these ground rules, you will ensure that the outsourced team is effective and provides quality support to your customers, all while reducing your own workload because everyone is on the same page.
Focus on how to best leverage your outsourced customer service team
It's important to work with your in-house CS team on how to best leverage the outsourced team on a regular ongoing basis. The in-house team should be familiar with the outsourced team's capabilities (and limitations) and understand how to best leverage them to support customers. This will help ensure customers receive timely and accurate support.
When done right, a fair bit of your time will be spent reducing your in-house team's need to work on tasks that could be done by the likely cheaper outsourced team. Ensuring your in-house team is passing as much of the workload as possible to the outsourced team is one way to accomplish this. Another approach is to look for technology solutions that will enable a greater share of the work being performed by the outsourced team or perhaps by neither team if the technology can enable customer self-service. Customer service chatbots are a good example of technology that greatly reduces costs and actually improves the customer service experience at the same time.
Build and Manage a CX Executive Dashboard
Use a customer support executive dashboard to monitor profitability and customer experience. The dashboard should include key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction, average handling time, and first contact resolution rate. This will help you track the team's performance and ensure that they are meeting your expectations. Additionally, the dashboard can help you identify areas where the team could improve their performance.
You should also hold regular team meetings to discuss performance and address any issues that may be arising. During these meetings, you can provide feedback to the team and help them identify ways to improve their service. Additionally, you can use these meetings to troubleshoot any challenges the team is encountering.
At Rush Order, we recommend a balanced scorecard approach to regular dashboard discussions. In particular, we measure five KPIs at the executive level:
Average inquiry quality (i.e. a semi-objective score derived from the Quality Assurance audits discussed above)
Most often, our CX balanced scorecard assigns an equal 20% weighting to each of these five categories. Of course, it's totally fine to deviate from an equal weighting if you have good reason to do so. For example, if lowering costs is your paramount goal, perhaps the weightings for CES and FCR should be increased relative to the other categories.
Would you like to download a copy of Rush Order's CX Balanced Scorecard? Subscribe to our newsletter and access our downloadable Excel version now.
Celebrate the customer service team's successes and learn from its failures
When it comes to outsourced customer service, it's important to celebrate the team's successes and learn from its failures. Outsourced or not, your agents need to feel like they are an integral part of your team, company culture, and brand. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, such as through regular reviews or by providing feedback after each interaction during your QA process.
Reviews can be held on a regular basis, such as every month or every quarter, to ensure that the team is meeting your expectations and providing quality support. During these reviews, you can discuss what went well and what could be improved. It's also a good opportunity to give praise to team members who have done a great job and thank them for their hard work.
Feedback can be given after each customer interaction is reviewed in your QA platform, whether it was positive or negative. This will help the team learn from their mistakes and continue providing excellent support. Plus, it will show your customers that you're taking their feedback seriously and are working to improve their experience.
At Rush Order, our QA software platform includes a points system where positive QA scores result in the agent earning credits that can be spent in the company store. From company swag to Apple AirPods to retailer gift cards, we give away lots of cool stuff as a reward for objectively good work. This gamifies the QA process for our agents, making feedback interactions a lot more fun and engaging, and a little less painful. Agents love it and our brands' customer experience benefits.
We hope these seven areas of key responsibilities help illustrate what it's like to manage an outsourced customer service provider and how to be successful in this effort, regardless of your CX goals.
If you haven't already subscribed to the Rush Order newsletter, please do so here. You can look forward to lots more tips, tricks, and helpful insights into the world of customer experience design coming your way.
